seasonal alerts
Spicy Messy Coconut Shrimp – Thai(ish) fast food from Maine
Good News! Maine shrimp (Pandalus borealis), is starting to get around. Delicious, affordable, wonder of wonders sustainable, the only thing that has ever been wrong with it is that you pretty much couldn’t get it unless you lived in coastal Maine – or ate in extremely expensive restaurants.
That’s changing. More and more high end fish markets are carrying Maine, aka pink, shrimp, and it’s getting a little easier for those far from the shrimp boats to miss a few of the middlemen. Port Clyde Fresh Catch, a fishermen’s marketing cooperative, is now selling in Brooklyn, New York and (go figure) Pawtucket, Rhode Island.
Read More…
This year’s first to flower, a Butterfly (Hippeastrum papilio), opened about a week ago.
Butterfly amaryllis, photographed yesterday
There are 5 more – 2 papilios and 3 Giant Dutch Hybrids – in various stages of budded up. Also, par for the course, we have 4 in healthy-but-not-promising mode; 1 pot of 3 robust papilios that has “wait ‘till summer” written all over it and 6 bulbs that have refused to green up well and will not be with us much longer.
They may be harboring bulb fly or simply be discouraged by last year’s cold dark spring.( It didn’t get warm and bright enough for them to grow until it was almost time for them to stop.) On the good side, they’ve underlined a lesson I probably should have absorbed some time ago.
Read More…
To avoid the same old same old, stock up on winter squash while you can still buy it from a farmer.
(* Thanksgiving note: If you got here looking for pumpkin pie, rather than the other way ’round, there is now a detailed recipe.)
As a general rule, there’s no need to issue the annual squash warning until shortly before Thanksgiving. But tomatoes aren’t the only fruits that suffer when it’s cold and wet for weeks on end in June and July. This year has been very hard on a lot of squash growers in the Northeast and mid-Atlantic.
So I figure I ought to mention it now: If you want to eat good winter squash all winter and don’t want to die of boredom, this is the time to start cruising the farmstands looking for interesting squash and stocking up on an assortment, bearing in mind that “winter squash” is really 3 different vegetables – Cucurbita pepo, C. maxima and C. moschata – each with a different season of glory.
Read More…
Is well named. Hauling yourself out to Unity on the 24th for MOFGA’S annual apple jamboree is a great way to spend a fall day and that’s because Maine has a lot of great apples.
Somewhere well north of 50 apple varieties laid out for tasting.
The tasting part is a unique opportunity to check out all sorts of flavors and textures, and of course to sample apples not routinely sold in stores.
A lot of the tastiest varieties are not likely to win beauty contests
Although some
do have their spectacular aspects.
Read More…
by Bill Bakaitis
It just goes to show how the collecting season varies here in the Northeast.
In Maine, where we had a poor mushroom season all year, the beginning of October brought with it a flush of Honey Mushrooms (Armillaria mellea complex) and the attendant Aborted Entoloma (Entoloma abortivum). The Hen of the Woods (Grifola frondosus) has not yet appeared on trees that I know and those that are found in Farmers Markets are pitiful fist sized, dried out specimens. I anticipate the big flush in the next week to ten days, conditions permitting.
Meanwhile, in the Hudson Valley and Catskills of New York, which had a fabulous mushroom year, the Honeys began in Mid-September, right on cue, but most of the Hens remained in their underground coops for another fortnight.
Bill finding a fat hen, on a fat oak
They are out now: succulent, fragrant, and large – with what appears to be an attendant flush of young chicks following big momma. Bring your basket and go get ’em.
It had to happen sooner or later, and sure enough here they are, catchily called Ecotulips.
As usual with newly-introduced organic versions of things, there still isn’t much selection and prices are a bit higher than for the conventional kind, but if you’d like to buy certified organic tulip bulbs, lovingly grown in Holland by an experienced bulb farmer, at least you’ve got the option.
a poeticus narcissus, probably 'Pheasant's Eye'
So if the title is Organic Tulips, why is the picture of a narcissus? Partly because I’ve already gone into how to grow tulips, and partly because there’s more to environmental responsibility than simply buying organic and calling it a day.
Read More…
ideal for making applesauce and (when very fresh) Always Right Apple Pie and Big Chunky Apple Cake with Pecans, among other baked items, also terrific fried in butter – to say nothing of simply eating out of hand.
I was actually shopping for tomatoes to sample (our bout with the blight means we’ll be buying whatever I put up for the winter), when there right in front of me among the more usual offerings were bags of Gravensteins.
YAY!
They’re called Red Gravensteins, I guess because that’s easier than ” the strain of Gravenstein that’s green with stipplings and smudges of red and red-orange”
This happy discovery was made at Schoolhouse Farm, in Warren, Maine. The owner, Bill Beckwith, has a high opinion of Gravensteins for fresh eating. He put in the trees 25 years ago and has continued to sell the fruit, even though it’s not a fast mover. “Not very many people know about them,” he said.
Gravensteins are the first early apples with real sweet-tart apple flavor, able to hold their own for deliciousness with the best of the later harvest, although they’re far less firm. But their season is short; they don’t keep well – in fact they hardly keep at all – and almost all of the commercial crop is grown in California.
On the Slow Food Ark of Taste they’re called ” Sonoma Gravensteins,” and I learned to love them in my Berkeley days, so they’re sort of California in my mind, too. Yet there’s no reason the left coast should claim them.
Read More…
They’re out, just about right on time.
In spite of the deluginal rains, not too many mushrooms have come up yet, and a recent visit to a favorite spot was not very productive, so we weren’t expecting to come upon them.
Dumb. If you want to collect a lot of mushrooms, always expect them.
Chanterelles in the only container available
As usual, they were hiding – but visible to anyone who was on the alert for a glint of orange
Chanterelles in typical spot
Bill has already written a super guide to chanterelle hunting, so my contribution comes from the kitchen
Read More…
Start on the endless spring to-do list. Lawn and garden cleanup, shrub pruning, seed-starting, seed planting…
and (among yet other things)
* Consider the freezer
* Start on the bulb maps
* Figure out where the garlic is going to go
* Cut back and repot tired houseplants
* Scout for morel spots Read More…
This was a day of cold and high wind: trees and tall grasses swaying, the black mesh deer fence rippling in waves, a low roar waxing and waning outside the office window, which being old kept admitting the sort of drafts that make you think of Dickens. Snow coming tonight, with wind chills we will not discuss.
But just last Sunday it was above 60, the moving air a balmy breeze, the kind of day that says “come out and garden,” even though there’s frost below the mud and a lot of dream-over-catalogs-duty between here and the bloom of the harebell
Hensol Harebell, a favorite columbine
Yet if all the early pruning is done, if it’s too snowy to rake and the holiday evergreenery has already been laid protectively over the sleeping perennial beds, what exactly is there to do?
I don’t know about you, but what I did was tidy the (temporarily) pleasant to occupy garden shed.
In some ideal universe, that task has also been accomplished: all tools were cleaned and sharpened in fall. Every size pot was neatly stacked, Read More…
